Taking Responsibility for the Pasts

Pólemos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-206
Author(s):  
Svend Erik Larsen
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Forensic Evidence ◽  
Personal Power ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
The Past

Abstract One of the most significant connections between power and responsibility occurs in relation to the past. The post-revolutionary political powers of the new nations in the nineteenth century reinterpreted or, less politely formulated, invented their past to fit the process of nation building and only then take responsibility for future development of the nations. And they were not alone: pre-nineteenth century periods and the 20th and 21st centuries abound with examples. In our personal lives, self-empowerment often depends on the capacity to take responsibility for one’s past, including all its happy and traumatic moments. In a court room the forensic evidence of past events alone gives the judges the power to decide the fate of the defendant. In neither of the cases power and responsibility can work together without activating individual and collective memory and without finding a language to express responsibility as a manifestation of political, formal and personal power in a process of political legitimization, legal affirmation of justice and personal identity formation. With literary examples from South Africa this article discusses power and responsibility in their relation to a troubled political, legal and personal past.

WOMEN, MARGINALITY AND THE ZULU STATE: WOMEN'S INSTITUTIONS AND POWER IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

1998 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEAN HANRETTA
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Government ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Definition Of

For a number of years the historiography of Southern Africa has been dominated by a materialist framework that has focused upon modes of production and forms of socio-political organization as the determining factors in historical change. Those historians concerned with the history of women in pre-colonial societies – even those who have privileged gender relations in their analyses – have largely been content to construct women's history by applying the insights of socio-economic and political analyses of the past to gender dynamics, and by projecting the insights of anthropological analyses of present gender relations into the past. Some of these historians have concluded that until the arrival of capitalism no substantial changes in the situations, power or status of women took place within Zulu society, even during the period of systemic transformation known as the mfecane in the early nineteenth century.More recently, Zulu gender history has become part of a larger debate connected to the changing political and academic milieu in South Africa. Representatives of a revived Africanist tradition have criticized materialist historians for writing Zulu history from an outsider's perspective and of focusing overly on conflict and power imbalances within the nineteenth-century kingdom in an effort to discredit contemporary Zulu nationalism. To counter this, historian Simon Maphalala has stressed the harmony of nineteenth-century Zulu society, the power advisors exercised in state government, and the lack of internal conflict. Maphalala also claims that women's subordinate role in society ‘did not cause any dissatisfaction among them’, and argues that ‘[women] accepted their position and were contented’. In recent constitutional debates many South African intellectuals including members of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALESA), invoked this ‘benign patriarchy’ model of pre-colonial gender relations to oppose the adoption of gender-equality provisions in the new constitution. As Cherryl Walker has noted, the hegemonic definition of traditional gender relations to which such figures have made rhetorical appeals often masks not only the historicity of these relations but also hides dissenting opinions (often demarcated along gender lines) as to what those relations are and have been.

Remembering the Past of Another

1973 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-532
Author(s):  
Roland Puccetti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Heart Transplants ◽  
The Past ◽  
Physical Universe ◽  
Sydney Shoemaker ◽  
Universal Truth ◽  
Basic Features

There has been a tendency in recent literature on personal identity to treat puzzle cases as unfair intrusions upon the discussion, like proposing to play chess without the Queen. Thus Terence Penelhum speaks of ‘imaginary worlds’ where our normal criteria do not hold and Sydney Shoemaker refers approvingly to G. C. Nerlich's dictum that it is a universal truth of our world, and not of ‘all possible worlds', that only by being identical with a witness to past events can one have the knowledge of them we have in memory.I would agree that where puzzle cases involve changing basic features of our physical universe, e.g. in having people's bodies go out of existence in one place and reappear in another, as recently envisaged by J. M. Shorter, there is some point in talking of ‘imaginary’ or ‘possible’ worlds. But where puzzle cases propose no such basic changes but ground the discussion in physiological possibilities, however unfeasible technologically, this seems an arbitrarily harsh description. It would be like Nineteenth Century philosophers saying talk of flying machines and heart transplants belongs, not to another age merely, but to other worlds.

The Continuous Past: Historical Referents in Nineteenth-Century American Journalism

2007 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 119-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty Houchin Winfield ◽  
Janice Hume
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
National History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
New Immigrants ◽  
American Journalism ◽  
Historical References

This study examines how nineteenth-century American journalism used history. Based primarily on almost 2,000 magazine article titles, the authors found a marked increase in historical referents by 1900. Primarily used for context and placement, historical references often noted the country's origins, leaders and wars, particularly the Civil War. By connecting the present to the past, journalists highlighted an American story worth remembering during a time of nation-building, increased magazine circulation, and rise of feature stories. References to past people, events and institutions reiterated a particular national history, not only to those long settled, but also to new immigrants. Journalistic textual silences were the histories of most women, African Americans, Native Americans and immigrants. This study found historical continuity in contrast to Lipsitz and a repeated national institutional core as opposed to Wiebe. It reinforced other memory studies about contemporary usefulness of the past, and agrees with Higham's contention that the century's journalistic reports created the initial awareness of the nation's history.

Remembering in times of misery: can older people in South Africa ‘get through’?

2005 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-541 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELS VAN DONGEN
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Older People ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
South African ◽  
Social History ◽  
Opposite Effect ◽  
African Society ◽  
South African Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This paper reports a study of the situations of disadvantaged older people in contemporary South African townships. It draws from their own accounts that were collected through ethnographic research in day centres and care homes. Most of the informants had experienced a succession of serious material, psychological, social and cultural losses. Their lives had been characterised by violence, inequality, disruption and poverty. A dominant theme in their accounts is that they can hardly ‘get through’ their lives. Their thankless, even alienated, situations are not only a function of personal losses but also have much to do with the recent political and social history of South Africa. The colonial and Apartheid eras have by and large been excluded from the country's collective memory, with the result that older people's experiences of those times are not valued as affirmational reminiscence or for shaping a kin group's common identity. Expressed recollections have acquired a different function, of being a means of articulating moral judgements on the present. The result is that memories, rather than bringing the generations together, have the opposite effect and widen the gap in understanding between the older and younger generations. This in turn has serious effects on older people's wellbeing. The silencing of memories reflects the society's radical break with the past, which has made it difficult for younger people to mourn or sympathise with older people's losses. While far from helpless victims, many of the older township residents lack meaningful frames by which to locate themselves in contemporary South African society.

scholarly journals COVID-19: Two sides to the story

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juanita Mellet ◽  
Michael Pepper
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Infected Person ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The Past ◽  
Significant Negative Impact ◽  
African Perspective ◽  
Two Sides

Since the report of the first COVID-19 infected person in South Africa, COVID-19 has moved from being a distant threat to a new reality that resulted in a nationwide lockdown. Though the lockdown was necessary to prepare health facilities for when the country reached its peak, it had a significant negative impact on the economy. In other areas such as the environment, work and education, and the personal lives of South Africans, the consequences have been varied. This article will highlight the positive and negative impact of the past 18 months of lockdown from a South African perspective.

Navy, nation and empire: nineteenth-century photographs of the British naval community overseas

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-112
Author(s):  
Cindy McCreery
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
The Past ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
St Helena ◽  
Naval Base

From approximately 1860, the vogue for both individual, ‘carte-de-visite’ portraits taken in professional photography studios as well as group photographs, often taken outdoors, swept across the British Empire. Photography studios from Plymouth to Cape Town catered to an increasingly enthusiastic naval community. This essay focuses on photographs taken in the 1860s of officers, their families and associates in and beyond the Royal Naval base at Simonstown near Cape Town, South Africa. Individual studio portraits such as ‘Officers of HMS Racoon, 1857-61’, outdoor shots of officers, women and children at naval picnics, photographs of dead officers as well as commemorative photographs of officers visiting Napoleon’s former tomb in St. Helena and Sir John Moore’s tomb at Corunna indicate the links made between the past and the present, and between, navy, nation and empire. The album also provides a unique documentary record of Prince Alfred’s 1867 visit to the Cape whilst Captain of HMS Galatea. When compared with the more formal, professional album of this cruise held in the Royal Archives in Windsor, the Wits album helps us to understand how photographs both identified and supported members of the British naval ‘family’ ashore as well as at sea.

scholarly journals “Moral Rubbish in Close Proximity”: Penal Colonization and Strategies of Distance in Australia and New Caledonia, c.1853–1897

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-471
Author(s):  
Briony Neilson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Coast ◽  
New Caledonia ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Temporal Distance ◽  
Penal Colony ◽  
The Past ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Convict Transportation

AbstractIn the second half of the nineteenth century, the two convict-built European settler colonial projects in Oceania, French New Caledonia and British Australia, were geographically close yet ideologically distant. Observers in the Australian colonies regularly characterized French colonization as backward, inhumane, and uncivilized, often pointing to the penal colony in New Caledonia as evidence. Conversely, French commentators, while acknowledging that Britain's transportation of convicts to Australia had inspired their own penal colonial designs in the South Pacific, insisted that theirs was a significantly different venture, built on modern, carefully preconceived methods. Thus, both sides engaged in an active practice of denying comparability; a practice that historians, in neglecting the interconnections that existed between Australia and New Caledonia, have effectively perpetuated. This article draws attention to some of the strategies of spatial and temporal distance deployed by the Australian colonies in relation to the bagne in New Caledonia and examines the nation-building ends that these strategies served. It outlines the basic context and contours of the policy of convict transportation for the British and the French and analyses discursive attempts to emphasize the distinctions between Australia and New Caledonia. Particular focus is placed on the moral panic in Australian newspapers about the alleged dangerous proximity of New Caledonia to the east coast of Australia. I argue that this moral panic arose at a time when Britain's colonies in Australia, in the process of being granted autonomy and not yet unified as a federated nation, sought recognition as reputable settlements of morally virtuous populations. The panic simultaneously emphasized the New Caledonian penal colony's geographical closeness to and ideological distance from Australia, thereby enabling Australia's own penal history to be safely quarantined in the past.

scholarly journals Citizenship, National Identity, and Nation-Building in Azerbaijan: Between the Legacy of the Past and the Spirit of Independence

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Ayça Ergun
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Territorial Integrity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
Building Process ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Citizenship Identity

Abstract The aim of this article is to shed light on the process of nation-building and the formation of national identity in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. The peculiarity of Azerbaijani nation-building is that the debates on how to build a nation and define national identity were nourished by two discourses: Azerbaijanism (Azerbaycançılıq) and Turkism (Tűrkçűlűk). The article focuses firstly on the discourses on national identity and nation-building in the pre-independence period while elaborating on the roots and premises of the nationalist independence movement. Secondly, it highlights the discourses of nation-building in the post-independence period while discussing the meanings attributed to national identity and nationhood. It shows how these two discourses shaped the existing identity formation in Azerbaijan with a particular emphasis on citizenship identity, marked by multiculturalism, hospitality, tolerance, and patriotism. Yet one can still categorize the country as having an incomplete nation-building process, due the violation of territorial integrity as a result of the Karabakh conflict.

Cultural Amnesia, Cultural Nostalgia and False Memory: Africa’s Identity Crisis Revisited

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 13-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali A. Mazrui
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
False Memory ◽  
Negative Selection ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Amnesia ◽  
Point Of Departure

Abstract The point of departure of this article is Ernest Renan’s observation that the secret of nation-building is to get one’s history wrong. We critically analyze – in the broader and historical context of the encounters between Africans and Europeans – the role of collective memory in its four functions of preservation, selection, elimination and invention. We focus on the first function to examine in depth how positive preservation of memory can become a form of nostalgia and how negative selection by memory can lead to elimination and amnesia. We argue that both nostalgia and amnesia can be forms of “getting one’s history wrong” in order to get one’s national identity right. We also attempt to show how historical invention can be consolidated into a false memory – placing something in the past which was never there before.

Memory Wars in the ‘New Europe’

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Stone
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
World War ◽  
Memory Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Cold War

Seventy years after the start of World War II, revisionists across Europe are arguing that Joseph Stalin was as much to blame for starting the war as was Adolf Hitler. As Adam Krzeminski rightly says, World War II is still being fought. This article sees ‘collective memory’ as a set of representations of the past that are constructed by a given social group (be it a nation, a family, a religious community, or other) through a process of invention, appropriation, and selection, and which have bearings on relationships of power within society. ‘Memory’ here refers not only to the academic study of memory but primarily to the various manifestations of ‘memory politics’ that have characterised Europe since the end of the Cold War. It is worth situating these European memory wars in a broader context, since they occur worldwide, especially in societies scarred by civil war, genocide, and authoritarianism, such as post-apartheid South Africa, Rwanda, Guatemala, and Argentina.

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